Anthology 2. Luminous [1998, 2010]

by Greg Egan

  The exception was a biochemist named Catherine Mendelsohn; the number listed for her in the LEI staff records had been cancelled. There were seventeen people with the same surname and initials in the national phone directory; none admitted to being Catherine Alice Mendelsohn, and none looked at all like the staff photo I had.

  Mendelsohn’s address in the Electoral Roll, an apartment in Newtown, matched the LEI records, but the same address was in the phone directory (and Electoral Roll) for Stanley Goh, a young man who told me that he’d never met Mendelsohn. He’d been leasing the apartment for the past eighteen months.

  Credit-rating databases gave the same out-of-date address. I couldn’t access tax, banking, or utilities records without a warrant. I had my knowledge miner scan the death notices, but there was no match there.

  Mendelsohn had worked for LEI until about a year before the move to Lane Cove. She’d been part of a team working on a gene-tailoring system for ameliorating menstrual side-effects, and although the Sydney division had always specialised in gynaecological research, for some reason the project was about to be moved to Texas. I checked the industry publications; apparently, LEI had been rearranging all of its operations at the time, gathering together projects from around the globe into new multi-disciplinary configurations, in accordance with the latest fashionable theories of research dynamics. Mendelsohn had declined the transfer, and had been retrenched.

  I dug deeper. The staff records showed that Mendelsohn had been questioned by security guards after being found on the North Ryde premises late at night, two days before her dismissal. Workaholic biotechnologists aren’t uncommon, but starting the day at two in the morning shows exceptional dedication, especially when the company has just tried to shuffle you off to Amarillo. Having turned down the transfer, she must have known what was in store.

  Nothing came of the incident, though. And even if Mendelsohn had been planning some minor act of sabotage, that hardly established any connection with a bombing four years later. She might have been angry enough to leak confidential information to one of LEI’s rivals, but whoever had bombed the Lane Cove laboratory would have been more interested in someone who’d worked on the foetal barrier project itself – a project which had only come into existence a year after Mendelsohn had been sacked.

  I pressed on through the list. Interviewing the ex-employees was frustrating; almost all of them were still working in the biotechnology industry, and they would have been an ideal group to poll on the question of who would benefit most from LEI’s misfortune, but the confidentiality agreement I’d signed meant that I couldn’t disclose anything about the research in question – not even to people working for LEI’s other divisions.

  The one thing which I could discuss drew a blank: if anyone had been offered a bribe, they weren’t talking about it – and no magistrate was going to sign a warrant letting me loose on a fishing expedition through a hundred and seventeen people’s financial records.

  Forensic examination of the ruins, and the sabotaged fibre-optic exchange, had yielded the usual catalogue of minutiae which might eventually turn out to be invaluable, but none of it was going to conjure up a suspect out of thin air.

  Four days after the bombing, just as I found myself growing desperate for a fresh angle on the case, I had a call from Janet Lansing.

  The backup samples of the project’s gene-tailored cell lines had been destroyed.

  * * *

  The vault in Milson’s Point turned out to be directly underneath a section of the Harbour Bridge – built right into the foundations on the north shore. Lansing hadn’t arrived yet, but the head of security for the storage company, an elderly man called David Asher, showed me around. Inside, the traffic was barely audible, but the vibration coming through the floor felt like a constant mild earthquake. The place was cavernous, dry and cool. At least a hundred cryogenic freezers were laid out in rows; heavily clad pipes ran between them, replenishing their liquid nitrogen.

  Asher was understandably morose, but co-operative. Celluloid movie film had been archived here, he explained, before everything went digital; the present owners specialised in biological materials. There were no guards physically assigned to the vault, but the surveillance cameras and alarm systems looked impressive, and the structure itself must have been close to impregnable.

  Lansing had phoned the storage company, Biofile, on the morning of the bombing. Asher confirmed that he’d sent someone down from their North Sydney office to check the freezer in question. Nothing was missing, but he’d promised to boost security measures immediately. Because the freezers were supposedly tamper-proof, and individually locked, clients were normally allowed access to the vault at their convenience, monitored by the surveillance cameras, but otherwise unsupervised. Asher had promised Lansing that, henceforth, nobody would enter the building without a member of his staff to accompany them – and he claimed that nobody had been inside since the day of the bombing, anyway.

  When two LEI technicians had arrived that morning to carry out an inventory, they’d found the expected number of culture flasks, all with the correct bar-code labels, all tightly sealed, but the appearance of their contents was subtly wrong. The translucent frozen colloid was more opalescent than cloudy; an untrained eye might never have noticed the difference, but apparently it spoke volumes to the cognoscenti.

  The technicians had taken a number of the flasks away for analysis; LEI were working out of temporary premises, a subleased corner of a paint manufacturer’s quality-control lab. Lansing had promised me preliminary test results by the time we met.

  Lansing arrived, and unlocked the freezer. With gloved hands, she lifted a flask out of the swirling mist and held it up for me to inspect.

  She said, ‘We’ve only thawed three samples, but they all look the same. The cells have been torn apart.’

  ‘How?’ The flask was covered with such heavy condensation that I couldn’t have said if it was empty or full, let alone cloudy or opalescent.

  ‘It looks like radiation damage.’

  My skin crawled. I peered into the depths of the freezer; all I could make out were the tops of rows of identical flasks, but if one of them had been spiked with a radioisotope …

  Lansing scowled. ‘Relax.’ She tapped a small electronic badge pinned to her lab coat, with a dull grey face like a solar cell: a radiation dosimeter. ‘This would be screaming if we were being exposed to anything significant. Whatever the source of the radiation was, it’s no longer in here – and it hasn’t left the walls glowing. Your future offspring are safe.’

  I let that pass. ‘You think all the samples will turn out to be ruined? You won’t be able to salvage anything?’

  Lansing was stoical as ever. ‘It looks that way. There are some elaborate techniques we could use to try to repair the DNA, but it will probably be easier to synthesise fresh DNA from scratch, and reintroduce it into unmodified bovine placental cell lines. We still have all the sequence data; that’s what matters in the end.’

  I pondered the freezer’s locking system, the surveillance cameras. ‘Are you sure that the source was inside the freezer? Or could the damage have been done without actually breaking in – right through the walls?’

  She thought it over. ‘Maybe. There’s not much metal in these things; they’re mostly plastic foam. But I’m not a radiation physicist; your forensic people will probably be able to give you a better idea of what happened, once they’ve checked out the freezer itself. If there’s damage to the polymers in the foam, it might be possible to use that to reconstruct the geometry of the radiation field.’

  A forensic team was on its way. I said, ‘How would they have done it? Walked casually by, and just—?’

  ‘Hardly. A source which could do this in one quick hit would have been unmanageable. It’s far more likely to have been a matter of weeks, or months, of low-level exposure.’

  ‘So they must have smuggled some kind of device into their own freezer, and aimed it at yours? Bu
t then … we’ll be able to trace the effects right back to the source, won’t we? So how could they have hoped to get away with it?’

  Lansing said, ‘It’s even simpler than that. We’re talking about a modest amount of a gamma-emitting isotope, not some billion-dollar particle-beam weapon. The effective range would be a couple of metres, at most. If it was done from the outside, you’ve just narrowed down your suspect list to two.’ She thumped the freezer’s left neighbour in the aisle, then did the same to the one on the right, and said, ‘Aha.’

  ‘What?’

  She thumped them both again. The second one sounded hollow.

  I said, ‘No liquid nitrogen? It’s not in use?’ Lansing nodded. She reached for the handle. Asher said, ‘I don’t think—’

  The freezer wasn’t locked; the lid swung open easily. Lansing’s badge started beeping – and, worse, there was something in there, with batteries and wires …

  I don’t know what kept me from knocking her to the floor, but Lansing, untroubled, lifted the lid all the way. She said mildly, ‘Don’t panic; this dose rate’s nothing. Threshold of detectable.’

  The thing inside looked superficially like a home-made bomb, but the batteries and timer chip I’d glimpsed were wired to a heavy-duty solenoid, which was part of an elaborate shutter mechanism on one side of a large, metallic grey box.

  Lansing said, ‘Cannibalised medical source, probably. You know these things have turned up in garbage dumps?’ She unpinned her badge and waved it near the box; the pitch of the alarm increased, but only slightly. ‘Shielding seems to be intact.’

  I said, as calmly as possible, ‘These people have access to high explosive. You don’t have any idea what the fuck might be in there, or what it’s wired up to do. This is the point where we walk out, quietly, and leave it to the bomb-disposal robots.’

  She seemed about to protest, but then she nodded contritely. The three of us went up onto the street, and Asher called the anti-terrorist services contractor. I suddenly realised that they’d have to divert all traffic from the bridge. The Lane Cove bombing had received some perfunctory media coverage, but this would lead the evening news.

  I took Lansing aside. ‘They’ve destroyed your laboratory. They’ve wiped out your cell lines. Your data may be almost impossible to locate and corrupt, so the next logical target is you and your employees. Nexus don’t provide protective services, but I can recommend a good firm.’

  I gave her the phone number; she accepted it with appropriate solemnity. ‘So you finally believe me?’ she said. ‘These people aren’t commercial saboteurs. They’re dangerous fanatics.’

  I was growing impatient with her vague references to ‘fanatics’. ‘Who exactly do you have in mind?’

  She said darkly, ‘We’re tampering with certain … natural processes. You can draw your own conclusions, can’t you?’

  There was no logic to that at all. God’s Image would probably want to force all pregnant women with HIV infections, or drug habits, to use the cocoon; they wouldn’t try to bomb the technology out of existence. Gaia’s Soldiers were more concerned with genetically engineered crops and bacteria than trivial modifications to insignificant species like humans – and they wouldn’t have used radioisotopes if the fate of the planet depended on it. Lansing was beginning to sound thoroughly paranoid; in the circumstances, though, I couldn’t really blame her.

  I said, ‘I’m not drawing any conclusions. I’m just advising you to take some sensible precautions, because we have no way of knowing how far this might escalate. But … Biofile must lease freezer space to every one of your competitors. A commercial rival would have found it a thousand times easier than any hypothetical sect member to get into the vault to plant that thing.’

  A grey armour-plated van screeched to a halt in front of us; the back door swung up, ramps slid down, and a squat, multilimbed robot on treads descended. I raised a hand in greeting and the robot did the same; the operator was a friend of mine.

  Lansing said, ‘You may be right. But then, there’s nothing to stop a terrorist from having a day job in biotechnology, is there?’

  * * *

  The device turned out not to be booby-trapped at all – just rigged to spray LEI’s precious cells with gamma rays for six hours, starting at midnight, every night. Even in the unlikely event that someone had come into the vault in the early hours and wedged themself into the narrow gap between the freezers, the dose they received would not have been much; as Lansing had suggested, it was the cumulative effect over months that had done the damage. The radioisotope in the box was cobalt 60, almost certainly a decomissioned medical source – grown too weak for its original use, but still too hot to be discarded – stolen from a ‘cooling off’ site. No such theft had been reported, but Elaine Chang’s assistants were phoning around the hospitals, trying to persuade them to re-inventory their concrete bunkers.

  Cobalt 60 was dangerous stuff, but fifty milligrams in a carefully shielded container wasn’t exactly a tactical nuclear weapon. The news systems went berserk, though: ATOMIC TERRORISTS STRIKE HARBOUR BRIDGE! et cetera. If LEI’s enemies were activists, with some ‘moral cause’ which they hoped to set before the public, they clearly had the worst PR advisers in the business. Their prospects of gaining the slightest sympathy had vanished the instant the first news reports mentioned the word radiation.

  My secretarial software issued polite statements of ‘No comment’ on my behalf, but camera crews began hovering outside my front door, so I relented and mouthed a few news-speak sentences for them which meant essentially the same thing. Martin looked on, amused – and then I looked on, astonished, as Janet Lansing’s own doorstop media conference appeared on TV.

  ‘These people are clearly ruthless. Human life, the environment, radioactive contamination: all mean nothing to them.’

  ‘Do you have any idea who might be responsible for this outrage, Dr Lansing?’

  ‘I can’t disclose that yet. All I can reveal right now is that our research is at the very cutting edge of preventative medicine – and I’m not at all surprised that there are powerful vested interests working against us.’

  Powerful vested interests? What was that meant to be code for, if not the rival biotechnology firm whose involvement she kept denying? No doubt she had her eye on the publicity advantages of being the victim of ATOMIC TERRORISTS, but I thought she was wasting her breath. In two or more years’ time, when the product finally hit the market, the story would be long forgotten.

  * * *

  After some tricky jurisdictional negotiations, Asher finally sent me six months’ worth of files from the vault’s surveillance cameras – all that they kept. The freezer in question had been unused for almost two years; the last authorised tenant was a small IVF clinic which had gone bankrupt. Only about 60 per cent of the freezers were currently leased, so it wasn’t particularly surprising that LEI had had a conveniently empty neighbour.

  I ran the surveillance files through image-processing software, in the hope that someone might have been caught in the act of opening the unused freezer. The search took almost an hour of supercomputer time and turned up precisely nothing. A few minutes later, Elaine Chang popped her head into my office to say that she’d finished her analysis of the damage to the freezer walls: the nightly irradiation had been going on for between eight and nine months.

  Undeterred, I scanned the files again, this time instructing the software to assemble a gallery of every individual sighted inside the vault.

  Sixty-two faces emerged. I put company names to all of them, matching the times of each sighting to Biofile’s records of the use of each client’s electronic key. No obvious inconsistencies showed up; nobody had been seen inside who hadn’t used an authorised key to gain access, and the same people had used the same keys, again and again.

  I flicked through the gallery, wondering what to do next. Search for anyone glancing slyly in the direction of the radioactive freezer? The software could have done it, but
I wasn’t quite ready for barrel-scraping efforts like that.

  I came to a face which looked familiar: a blonde woman in her mid-thirties, who’d used the key belonging to Federation Centennial Hospital’s Oncology Research Unit, three times. I was certain that I knew her, but I couldn’t recall where I’d seen her before. It didn’t matter; after a few seconds’ searching, I found a clear shot of the name badge pinned to her lab coat. All I had to do was zoom in.

  The badge read: C. MENDELSOHN.

  There was a knock on my open door. I turned from the screen; Elaine was back, looking pleased with herself.

  She said, ‘We’ve finally found a place who’ll own up to having lost some cobalt 60. What’s more, the activity of our source fits their missing item’s decay curve exactly.’

  ‘So where was it stolen from?’

  ‘Federation Centennial.’

  * * *

  I phoned the Oncology Research Unit. Yes, Catherine Mendelsohn worked there – she’d done so for almost four years – but they couldn’t put me through to her; she’d been on sick leave all week. They gave me the same cancelled phone number as LEI, but a different address: an apartment in Petersham. The address wasn’t listed in the phone directory; I’d have to go there in person.

  A cancer-research team would have no reason to want to harm LEI, but a commercial rival – with or without their own key to the vault – could still have paid Mendelsohn to do their work for them. It seemed like a lousy deal to me, whatever they’d offered her – if she was convicted, every last cent would be traced and confiscated – but bitterness over her sacking might have clouded her judgement.

  Maybe. Or maybe that was all too glib.